Look Ma! No hands!

It is 1966. The construction project that has extended the road I live on is underway. There will be twenty house on this road, a cul-de-sac about two hundred yards long. The road came before the houses. It begins on the other side of a longer road running perpendicularly through it and is wider than mine. There were no houses on either side of the longer road until the 1950s. My parents were early settlers there, among the first. Our house was built in 1956. This new road is wider than mine and has a slight grade, rising from the road that bisects it and my side of it. We children find it an ideal place for bicycling on weekends after the construction crews have gone home. Smooth, no cars, and the cul-de-sac ends on a curve shielded by trees, hidden from parental view. Not that anyone was doing anything bad.
I was eight and late to learn how to bicycle. My brother, Sam, was ten. Having mastered standard bicycling, he and other kids his age are learning to ride with no hands. This starts with doing it while coasting; pedaling comes later. It's something that I and my asymmetrical body never master, but Sam is good at it. 
He's so good that he wants to show off his new skill to our mother, who is thirty-five years old. She and I get in the car, a black Dodge, and drive to the end of the cul-de-sac.

Sam—Sammy—begins the ride to the end. He pedals up to speed, then coasts, then takes his hands off the handlebars. And then, the showstopper: He puts his hands on his hips. This says, I am a cool boy, so skilled at this that I can strike this adult pose casually; riding with no hands is as natural to me as standing around like a grownup. I am a special boy. 
Our mother smiles broadly as she watches her second of three sons do this. At the time, I take this as a sign of how impressed she is with his new ability, happy that he's achieved it. I don't understand that it's more about how cute he is.
When I worked at an art museum store, I sold a mug to a boy around nine who was buying it for his mother. It occurred to me what a remarkable thing it must be to have this thing that came out of you covered with slime and blood grow into a person capable of washing, dressing, and feeding himself and then looking at an array of items and deciding which of them would be something you would like. That boy is a man in his mid twenties now. I hope his mother was able to appreciate such things and not weighed down and distracted by too many of the obligations that fill our days.

Real losing

The Complete and Total Loser goes by his title because he has achieved so little in life. "Losing," in his case, stems from failing to attain the things most take for granted; a spouse, children, confidence. 
Today the Loser lost his job, which he'd had for a dozen years. Now that's losing.
He'd been living in the suburbs and working in the city. He kept an inexpensive bicycle in the city to go from the train station to work. Today, instead of locking it to a rack, the Loser took the bike on the train with him and ferried it home. He now has no reason to go into the city and he owns nothing in it.

This is the Loser's bicycle on the train. The attractive woman was reading "Boomerang," by Micheal Lewis.

From getting old to being old

Sometimes the Complete and Total Loser is reminded that he's in his declining years and that he's not getting old, he is old. Yesterday, that reminder came in the form of a woman who rode past him during one of his rare rides in the heart of his city. She did it with little effort. 
Look at her thigh. Powerful, young. Solid muscle. 

This young bike rider put the Loser in his place.

How to lock a bike

At work three days ago the Complete and Total Loser began telling a group of his coworkers about a bike he'd seen trashed and how he regretted not advising the young women he'd seen locking it on the best way to lock a bicycle. Two of the women laughed and rolled their eyes, one saying, "Oh, yeah, that's right; your way of locking a bike is the only right way to do it." This woman, of course, being someone who constantly tells the Loser and others how to do things.

Don't lock your bike like this.

He got angry. When angry, the Loser swears a lot.

Or this.

"I've ridden bikes for 30 fucking years in cities in four fucking countries," he said. "I know how to lock a fucking bicycle and there is a right way and a wrong way to fucking lock a bicycle. You put the U-lock through the rear forks to make it more stable and leave less room for pry bars and, if you're smart, you have a second lock or cable to secure the front wheel. So yes, there is a better fucking way to lock a bicycle than what this woman did, but I thought it'd be creepy to approach her, me being a stranger."

Or especially this. There are, as the cab driver in the background said to the Loser moments after this picture was taken, "So many criminals, so many dishonest men."

A Woman Who Lives in the Same Building as the Loser

Her bicycle sits, locked to the railing outside the building she, the Complete and Total Loser, and four others inhabit. It has one speed, balloon tires, is heavy, low. When she went away for Christmas she left it in the basement, where the Loser stores his own bike at night. The tire went flat, a slow leak. He took it off, carried it upstairs and mended it. Some days after her return he mentioned it to her. She'd known of the leak and was baffled by its healing. She thanked him and left a card and a patch kit outside his door the next day.
She is small. When they chat on the stairs, a landing, she stands on a step above him and is still shorter than the Loser, but not much. (He, too, is short.) She is narrow, fine-boned, smart. She goes full time to a Seven-Sisters school and waitresses full time. The Loser has seen her boyfriend on the stairs, in the entryway. He says hello to him, the boyfriend grunts in return. Not unfriendly; he just doesn't know what to make of this older man, a loser, who lives in the same building as his girlfriend.
Most of the buildings in the neighborhood are for single families. Neighbors have asked the Loser if he would, perhaps, say something to the woman about her bike, which they'd rather not need to step around while walking past the building. He won't. She works so hard, she's so small, the bike's so heavy. She'll move before long. Up and out in a few years, if not sooner. He's going to print the photo of the bike and give it to her. She doesn't know this but one day, decades from now, she'll find it in a box or folder and remember the blue bicycle she had when she lived in that city where she went to that school and worked in that restaurant and had that boyfriend. She won't remember how she got the photograph and assume she'd taken it herself.